'Valerian' is 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' in space: Luc Besson

Luc Besson has created a whole new world for the film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before on a movie screen. Anyone familiar with The Fifth Element (1997) knows how visually creative Besson can be, but this time the filmmaker has outdone himself.

Besson, 58, is a charming Parisian with a very large life — his resume includes four wives, five children, five dozen films in his various incarnations as writer, director and producer. He wrote the Taken and Transporter series and wrote and directed La Femme Nikita, Le Grand Blue, The Professional, Lucy and The Family, among many others.

Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets is a labour of love for Besson. It’s a story he’s followed since he was a 10-year-old fan of Pierre Christin’s Valerian et Laureline comics; it took nine years to make the movie.

The film stars Dane DeHaan as Valerian and Cara Delevingne as Laureline, futuristic detectives charged with safeguarding Alpha — a huge city populated with fantastic species from all over the universe. It’s an action-adventure/ love story; “It’s Raiders of the Lost Ark in space,” says Besson. “That was my guideline.”

We spoke to Luc Besson as he was putting the finishing touches on the film in Montreal.

What’s it like to have followed Valerian and Laureline all these years, and now, to see them come to life?

“After a while you really have the impression that you know them, that they exist. I know Leeloo, I know Nikita, I know Lucy. They’re part of my family. I just know them. It’s really alive in my head. It’s very strange.” [Laughs]

There’s a lot of humour in the movie. Valerian and Laureline are sparring all the time.

“What I love about it, it’s the 28th century, aliens everywhere, and the small story inside the film is ‘will the guy get the girl?’ I love having this tiny love story, them fighting with each other, in the middle of a huge, global, sci-fi thing.”

How do you begin to cast something this close to you?

“I try not to think about the cast when I’m writing the characters. And then after, when I’m meeting actors, there’s always this moment where I know it’s him or her. I just know it. I think it’s the exact same process when you meet someone and know it’s your husband or your wife. I met Dane and after about a minute, I knew he was Valerian. Then I got scared, because if he said no, then I was in the s—. I wouldn’t be able to erase the image of him from my mind. To me, he’s the new [Leonardo] DiCaprio. It’s insane. And Cara Delevingne? I love her! She’s the real surprise in the film.”

To create the world of Valerian, you asked animators and artists worldwide to submit ideas about the future. Then you picked a handful to work with and gave them time and creative freedom. How did all that evolve?

“It comes from a conversation I had with an animator who works for a big studio for big sci-fi films. I asked how the work was there, and he said it was a very segmented. You come for six weeks and you have to do four drawings a day, and it has to be this size, and this, and that. I said, ‘What if you come up with an idea?’ And he said, ‘Oh no! You don’t have ideas. You get to do what they ask.’

“Suddenly I thought, ‘Maybe I can use this frustration.’” [Laughs]

It worked! When you see all the aliens of Alpha, it’s like a whole new universe.

“That’s what we tried to do. We worked on these characters so much. I had to choose from among 6,000 of them, and we had to know who is doing what — where are they living, what are their functions in Alpha, what do they do, where do they come from. The bible [of the production] is 600 pages! We created everything. We have three or four pages for each alien — what they eat, how they reproduce, what they do.”

You have been writing since childhood. What got you started?

“I started because when I was very young, six or seven, I was living with my parents who were scuba divers. We were living in Yugoslavia and Greece, and in Greece you have the sea, the sky and the rocks and that’s it. There is nothing else. The only way to make up a story is to have your imagination growing. I think my imagination comes from this period, because I’d basically grab a rock or a piece of wood, and it became a chariot, then cowboys and Indians, and an hour later the same rock became a space ship. There was no internet, no video games, no toys even — it pushes your skills for creating things.